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Growing on the heels of the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire was in some ways a continuation of its predecessor, extending its history for another 1,000 years. With a new capital at Constantinople, however, it also had a distinctly Eastern character of its own. Readers are transported to Byzantium in this absorbing volume, which recounts the history of this brilliant and articulate civilization as well as the many cultural and architectural achievements it spawned before falling to the Ottomans in 1453. Seminal events are covered in depth in the text and also highlighted in a timeline.
Essays on African-American politics, literature and music by Sterling A. Brown (1901-1989), which point out the biases against black Americans in white cultural expression and argue for a recognition of the cultural contributions of African Americans.
Just as the sinking of the Titanic is embedded in public consciousness in the English-speaking world, so the crash of Japanese Airlines flight JL123 has become part of Japanese collective memory. This book examines the crash, considering why it has come to have such importance for the Japanese.
This book begins with a simple question: Why haven't historians and musicologists been talking to one another? Historians frequently look to all aspects of human activity, including music, in order to better understand the past. Musicologists inquire into the social, cultural, and historical contexts of musical works and musical practices to develop theories about the meanings of compositions and the significance of musical creation. Both disciplines examine how people represent their experiences. This collection of original essays, the first of its kind, argues that the conversation between scholars in the two fields can become richer and more mutually informing. The volume features an eloq...
A noted Middle East specialist looks at conspiracy theories and the way they control life and politics in the region.
From the novels of Anne Rice to The Lost Boys, from The Terminator to cyberpunk science fiction, vampires and cyborgs have become strikingly visible figures within American popular culture, especially youth culture. In Consuming Youth, Rob Latham explains why, showing how fiction, film, and other media deploy these ambiguous monsters to embody and work through the implications of a capitalist system in which youth both consume and are consumed. Inspired by Marx's use of the cyborg vampire as a metaphor for the objectification of physical labor in the factory, Latham shows how contemporary images of vampires and cyborgs illuminate the contradictory processes of empowerment and exploitation that characterize the youth-consumer system. While the vampire is a voracious consumer driven by a hunger for perpetual youth, the cyborg has incorporated the machineries of consumption into its own flesh. Powerful fusions of technology and desire, these paired images symbolize the forms of labor and leisure that American society has staked out for contemporary youth. A startling look at youth in our time, Consuming Youth will interest anyone concerned with film, television, and popular culture.
Spying, the “world’s second oldest profession,” is hardly limited to the traditional great power countries. Intelligence Elsewhere, nevertheless, is the first scholarly volume to deal exclusively with the comparative study of national intelligence outside of the anglosphere and European mainstream. Past studies of intelligence and counterintelligence have tended to focus on countries such as the United States, Great Britain, and Russia, as well as, to a lesser extent, Canada, Australia, France, and Germany. This volume examines the deep historical and cultural origins of intelligence in several countries of critical importance today: India, China, the Arab world, and indeed, Russia, th...
Presents 12,860 entries listing scholarly publications on Greek studies. Research and review journals, books, and monographs are indexed in the areas of classical, Hellenistic, Biblical, Byzantine, Medieval, and modern Greek studies., but no annotations are included. After the general listings, entries are also indexed by journal, text, name, geography, and subject. The CD-ROM contains an electronic version of the book. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Stealing the Show is a study of African American actors in Hollywood during the 1930s, a decade that saw the consolidation of stardom as a potent cultural and industrial force. Petty focuses on five performers whose Hollywood film careers flourished during this period—Louise Beavers, Fredi Washington, Lincoln “Stepin Fetchit” Perry, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and Hattie McDaniel—to reveal the “problematic stardom” and the enduring, interdependent patterns of performance and spectatorship for performers and audiences of color. She maps how these actors—though regularly cast in stereotyped and marginalized roles—employed various strategies of cinematic and extracinematic performance to negotiate their complex positions in Hollywood and to ultimately “steal the show.” Drawing on a variety of source materials, Petty explores these stars’ reception among Black audiences and theorizes African American viewership in the early twentieth century. Her book is an important and welcome contribution to the literature on the movies.
From 1968 to 1972, St. Louis was home to the Black Artists' Group (BAG), a seminal arts collective that nurtured African American experimentalists involved with theater, visual arts, dance, poetry, and jazz. Inspired by the reinvigorated black cultural nationalism of the 1960s, artistic collectives had sprung up around the country in a diffuse outgrowth known as the Black Arts Movement. These impulses resonated with BAG's founders, who sought to raise black consciousness and explore the far reaches of interdisciplinary performance--all while struggling to carve out a place within the context of St. Louis history and culture.A generation of innovative artists--Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, an...